


Diaz in the Wind: A Legend of Lust, Tragedy, and Triumph

by kingorquing



Category: Austin Powers (Movies), The Mask (1994)
Genre: 100 per cent sincere, M/M, ONE HUNDRED PER CENT SINCERE, Smut, i would never write something insincerely, im a straight kantian, it is against my moral code, smut but not porn, this is not porn, this is tasteful erotica on par with Sacher-masoch, well not straight per se
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-08-23 22:31:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20245819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingorquing/pseuds/kingorquing
Summary: At the end of the Mask, hot outlaw Dorian Tyrell is unaccounted for-- we know he is flushed beneath the Coco Bongo by The Mask, but we are never shown what this Underworld looks like. At the end of the Austin Powers trilogy, he is fully cemented as a mere figment of popular culture: transitive, liminal, purposeless. And though Jim Carrey does get his own "mojo" by the end of the Mask, I don't buy it. How can a loser like that, who can't even talk to Cameron Diaz like a human being, get mojo from turning into the Horny Wolf of old cartoons?Since I have to do all the goddamn heavy lifting around here, Baby, I'm going to be the man to answer these loose ends. Well come, traveler. Well come."If you listen to this whilst eating a hot dog you will be happy." - The Local Hamburger Guy"Baba?" - My friend's kid"You should pursue a PhD program." - My TA, but not about this.





	1. so its set like RIGHT after the mask, and i only used austin powers' universe, instead of timeline. because it's a movie with time travel it's hard to set things on a timeline and i don't have room in the story for anything super complicated.

My God, Stanley Ipkiss thought, dizzy from his passionate tryst with Cameron Michelle Diaz on the bridge. 

My God, he thought (and the God was Loki), I have made mouth-love with the crown jewel of 'Being John Malkovich'! Smokin'! 

He was sitting on his feet in the corner of his apartment, furiously rubbing two newspaper articles together to make a blaze. He had had enough of this world: his screeching landlady, his exceptionally talented and beautiful girlfriend, his chunky dog, his closet filled with money-- it was nothing to him. The newspaper caught fire in his hands, a beast overtook with sudden fury, and it rushed to sink its teeth into his cheap shag carpeting. Though the kiss had been spectacular, rivaling the pure adoration of the poetry written by Mesopotamian religious Lesbians, it had not been enough. The moment the Mask left his hand, Stanley Ipkiss felt like less than himself. He felt cheated. And as he had driven home, the sun turned darker in the back of his mind, and the city crumbled. Where was it? Where was the light, the love, the ecstatic revolution of identity? It had left, along with the Mask. Stanley knew what he had to do to get it back. 

He had to go into the world beneath the Coco Bongo. 

*** 

"Where do rodentia go when faced with the inexplicable maw of a steel trap?" The little girl asking was plaintive. Her eyes were enormous, sunken deep into her face and empty as the night. As she spoke, her hands fidgeted with her frock, and her feet rocked back and forth on the dry, silver grass that sprouted between the worn linoleum. She picked up one of the many rats and cooed to it, nipping its small pink nose with her own small, pink teeth. The man she spoke to stared in absolute rapture. There was nothing menacing in his gaze, besides the natural fervor of spiritual truth. He was on his knees, though as he raised his face, the pose seemed ill-fitting. He had a strong jawline, dark hair, and intense, tensed, focused, stern eyes. 

"That's not what you should be asking me, N'Quaith," he said quietly, digging his nails into the floor. 

She looked amused, and her face aged seventy thousand years while her body remained static. "What should I be asking you?" 

He slowly rose to his feet; she did not stop him. 

His eyes hardened even more than they were already, not so much water into ice, but ice into brittle, enormous, world-ending glacier. 

"Where does an Incorrigible Man go when he is Flushed by a cartoon demon?" 

Dorian Tyrell had been here for a decade, though only a day had passed in the real world. He was much older, though. It didn't show in his skin, but it infected his mind: his terrible age, his awful burden of the world, that drove him to worship of N'Quaith. 

She laughed. "It is not so long now, Little Baby. Jim Carrey is coming." 

"What?" 

"What?" 

"You said--" 

"No." 

"Oh." 

*** 

Narrator (evocatively): AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY AUSTIN POWERS PSYCHEDELIA FUN SEX AUSTIN POWERS YEAH BABY ENGLAND AMERICA MR INTERNATIONAL AUSTIN POWERS THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY!!!!

One morning, as Austin Powers was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

"That's not too shagadelic!" he tried to cry, but when he spoke, his voice was self-transformed, from his sexy, beautiful, dulcet English tones to the scream of a horrible animal: like air leaving an enormous helium balloon. He recalled that helium was not in low supply, because recently, he had departed completely from the constraints of time and space. While his last adventure, which seemed a blur in his mind, had surely occurred, because though a blur, it was there, he had ceased to continue into the future. Every day, he awoke, to his knowledge; every night, he partied, also to his knowledge. Yet time did not pass. He would find himself somewhere else suddenly, in someone's fleeting, outdated impression of him, in an obscure piece of fanfiction, in a lewd bathroom drawing in Boston, Maryland. 

What had he done, indeed? What had he only done in the thoughts of others? Was there a difference? 

The transformation had ceased, leaving him winded. "Groovy," he mumbled, finding himself drunk. 

***


	2. as i descend into madness, the incredulity i feel deciding between what is the obvious and what is the abstract diminishes, as does the distinction between the two

As the Mask, Jim Carrey, Stanley Ipkiss (a man of three names, can that truly be any greater than one?) approached the front doors of the Coco Bongo in broad daylight, he began to undress. His body had become malformed by some distant entity's swollen and unceasing imagination: he was as tall as a flagpole, thin as a rail, his fingers stretched endlessly towards the center of the Earth, and the closer someone looked at him, the more of his cells died. The bouncer, a stocky man with two kids at home, held his hand out to stop Stanley. "Only real G's allowed, baby," he whispered, in the same voice he used to tell his little daughter that there were no tormented bodies beneath her bed, no wicked eyes on the ceiling. Stanley scowled. If he had the Mask, this would only be a matter of cartoon physics and perhaps a sprinkle of drag. 

Instead, he sank to his lengthed knees and clasped his hands together. 

"O!" he wailed. "O', vision, can you tell me the difference between absence and presence? For is absence not merely the presence of nothing, and presence merely the absence of it? A mouth full of words says the same as a silent one! A heavy meal produces nausea just as starvation can! When the wolves howl for me, will you see a difference between my body when it exists, and my body when all that remains are bones between the yellowing teeth of mountainous carnivores, and when they howl at the moon among rustling pines, does it sound any different than the night if it were as still and silent as a drop of water on the edge of a glass? There are no distinctions between extremes, I mean! Horseshoe theory! Goddammit, won't you listen to me?!" 

The bouncer leveled his eyes. 

"Tuck away your David Foster Wallace, squire. Real G's read Foucault." 

Stanley stifled his sobs and rose to his feet. He extended one of his ever-extending hands, for the bouncer to shake, but the man could not comprehend Stanley's unending form, and turned away with a bloody nose. Stanley hissed. He would have to try another way in. 

*** 

N'Quaith was fading. 

Dorian Tyrell could see it. 

He had had a pack of cigarettes with him when he was flushed, and though they were quite wet, the pack had never run out over the last ten, twelve, fifteen years. He checked his watch. It was only a tan line. He put a wet cigarette in his mouth and lit it, then began to smoke. How often had he done this? How many crimes had he punctuated with a cigarette, and looking over many more horrors to the mortal eye, brought a hand up to inhale from it, the same way he did now? 

"We do not think about our repeated gestures. We do not think how they tie us to certain moments in time." N'Quaith looked like Tash Sultana now. They were sitting and strumming a guitar, nodding their head as they played out that sweet acoustic orgasm that only the few hear, and the privileged can remember. 

"You are in my head, N'Quaith. I know this now." Dorian spat out the cigarette. It tasted like blueberries. He hated blueberries. 

"Think of all the doors you have ever pulled closed. Think of the boxes you have lifted. Think of the men you have shot, same hand, same finger, same aim, same gaze. And you will know that life is a series of discrete ministrations that are all completely identical. Do you know this?" 

It was their last sermon. Dorian would have to remember it, but he was only half-listening, still bitter, still cruel: even his devotion took on these characteristics. He looked down on N'Quaith as much as he longed for their voice inside of his head. 

"Baby Bitch." N'Quaith's voice had risen, and she took the half-familiar face of Cameron Diaz. Dorian turned to look, and froze, shocked by the appearance. He had not seen her in how-ever-long, had witnessed her might and terror only briefly, had longed to control her, own her, and come up empty. But he would learn. He knew he would learn. He sat down on his knees and held his hands up towards the sky. 

"I am listening." 

"Good. So like, let's say you make toast on Sunday. You put it in the toaster, you get a plate, and you eat it. When you do that again on Monday, you may not move exactly the same. But your actions will echo forever through time and space, and may be cloned from others, ones you remember, leaving an eternal imprint of your toast-making. Do you regret your crimes now? Do you know that Hell and Heaven are not on either end of a spectrum? They are averages of behavior. To kill once can be forgiven. To kill again, in the same way, strengthens the motive of an action you once undertook. That thing you tell yourself, that once it is done, it may as well be done again, is not true. People can change. The ever-existence of what we have done may go on forever and ever, insofar as that is a measurement of the enormous cavern of time, but ephemerality is not as freeing as you think it is." 

Dorian did not understand. Even I did not understand. 

*** 

Austin Powers was standing behind the Coco Bongo, near a dumpster. He stared at his own hands. He wore fishnets and a cowboy hat. 

When he saw Stanley, clipping out of existence, he knew why he had been placed there. He beckoned the man closer with one finger, and did not introduce himself. Stanley too, was silent. Austin unhinged his jaw and slurped up Stanley's extenuated form like a long, metaphysically unlimited piece of spaghetti. And then he swallowed himself. 

***


	3. listen to lay all your love on me from mamma mia for this one. trust me it'll blow your mind. you want some drugs?

A black hole's nature is to subsume all that dares come near it. And much in that way, when Austin Powers unhinged his jaw and subsumed Jim, and then himself, much like a black hole, they were transported into the same world that exists beyond them. This was a world of many simple things: therapy waiting rooms, sundae bars, all both in the shape of an orb and a cube all at once. Small bees made of stars. Beautiful women who like to haunt our world. 

Here, they forgot who they were independent of each other. They were only traveling particles. Passive. Nigh aimless. 

"Eat this popcorn and sit on my face." They spiraled closer. They were nude. The moment was charged. 

Austin Powers reached out and grabbed Stanley Ipkiss' penis. He waggled it back and forth and demanded of him, "What is this? What is this?!?" Stanley only smiled. He brought his feet way up over his head, circled them twice around his abdomen, and presented his anus. "Things are happening," he guaranteed. Austin took the invitation, and as he entered Stanley, his mojo blew fireworks all over the cosmos, which turned into stars, then developed galaxies; soon, small civilizations had sprouted. And every single one of them looked like Sir Austin Danger Powers. Their buildings, their people, even their clothes were made in his naked image. These societies were never at war, they never hungered; water flowed between their English fingers, and as did gold, and glitter. But they died off anyways. And as they did, Austin came absolute ropes inside of Stanley. 

"Oh, Mommy," Austin said. "Oh, mommy. Give me your Milk. I want you to cut my umbilical cord. Circumcise me Mommy!!! Baby want nums, sixty nine! I want you to shove a pen up my urethra, Mommy. Make me piss it out, Mommy. I want to learn." 

"Yeah, okay," Stanley said. "I don't need a Mask to be a Mommy to you." 

"That was good," the other agreed. They held hands and smooched. 

***


	4. the pitch meeting

"Okay, Mac. Tell us what you've got." A suited man clasps his hands on the glass desk across from Tyler. 

The Los Angeles sun is setting behind them. A late-night meeting, they all think, in different ways. For Tyler, it means a special opportunity; someone has pulled strings for his idea. For Dylan, the producer, it means ordering an espresso at the Santa Monica eatery where they review treatments in the afternoon. And for Lawrence, the executive consultant, it means his patience somehow runs thinner. 

Tyler shrugs off his bright cobalt Members Only jacket and straddles a chair backwards. His light hair dusts over his attentive verdigris eyes, looking like a schoolboy fresh from the gates. But under that face is passion. Passion and drive. Passion and drive and ambition. 

He clears his throat and begins to describe how he'd like the scene to go. "So, Loki comes by and shoves his spear up everyone's asses. And they're all brainwashed. And then they build a portal so aliens can come through." 

"Through his asshole?" Dylan prompts, leaning forward on one elbow. 

"Through his asshole," Tyler confirms, nodding. "Then they're brainwashed around it. Then Cameron Diaz comes and pegs them all. So then they're her army. And they kill God. Now Cameron Diaz is God, and decides to take an immortal shape to which no one can look into her eyes, because they'll melt into the plethora of the unconscious of the world, and become millions and billions of different pieces of themselves, so scattered that they cannot figure out if they are conscious or in hell." 

"And? Then what? Is that the end?" Lawrence, an executive producer, asks. 

"And then Cameron Diaz finally ejaculates." 

"Oh!! I'm so happy for her!" Dylan celebrates. 

Lawrence shakes Tyler's hand. "You've got a three picture deal, Mac. A three picture goddamn doodly deal." 

And then Tyler ejaculates. "OHHHHh!"

Unfortunately, The Mask, and its demented offspring, Son of the Mask, were not the box office hits that they were intended to be. Tyler's great plan, for the final movie, Revenge of Loki and Cameron Diaz, never came to fruition. Balderdash, but such is how some things are. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone were going to read this, which Praise, nobody is, this would feel like cheating.


	5. Man! Man! Boy! (boy)! Man! Man! Boy! (boy)!

Cameron Michelle Diaz, Queen of Light, Destroyer of Kingdoms, Ruler of the Seven Levels, was taking her breakup well. 

She had seen the hunger in Jim Carrey's kiss, knew that he was not connecting with her, but with the figment of the Mask that still existed inside his head. So when he disappeared, she was unsurprised. There can be such a dramatic difference between how we react when we know something is going to happen; are we always crunching numbers on emotional devastation? Perhaps if Cameron suddenly fell in love, before she had time to think she was lonely, it would sweep her off her feet all the more; and if her heart was broken just as abruptly, before she had time to dislike the relationship, it would come close to killing her. 

Dorian Tyrell knew Stanley Ipkiss was going to arrive in the Underneath The Coco Bongo World soon enough, for example. So his eyes would be hardened, his shoulders straight, his religious paraphernalia hidden. But to be caught vulnerable? That would change things between them indeed. 

Cameron considered the facts of the narrative. It had developed little, for all of its flowery words and philosophical waxing. A man outside time and space, a man longing to be outside time and space, and a man trapped inside of it, haunted with Old Religions: they were spiraling closer together. She could see it all from her downtown apartment. If it was ever shown during The Mask, her apartment would have been the highlight of the movie. Cameron did all of her decorating personally, and had spent upwards of 32 cents to make her house a home. 

The flooring was thousands of souls captured mid-orgy, entangled together in a constant, world-shaking fuck, who shrieked when she wore her high heels. The walls in the living room were covered in city sewer grates, only the largest, only the ones that had once failed, and dropped an unsuspecting pedestrian into the underbelly (more food for N'Quaith), all hung with zipties from holographic thumbtacks. Her wicker coffee table strained against the imposition of form onto it. It looked as though it would burst at any moment, were it not for the extensive literary collection on top of it. Marquis de Sade and Miranda July were her favorites. 

She had a huge painting of her own nude body in a chicken's eye. Her salt and pepper shakers were scythes, enormous. 

In order to get over the break up, Cameron was walking around with a hammer. Occasionally, she would smack the flat end into her palm and hiss; other times, she would swing it wildly, cackling, while the floorgy looked up in fear. She wore an exquisite emerald green dressing gown with a high collar and a loose waist; all of the shape came from her shoulders and neck, the nudge of her hips now and again. 

Truthfully, Cameron was one of the most powerful people on the planet. Her soul alone emitted such a bright glow that anyone she told a personal secret to would be evaporated immediately by the light. She had mingled with the Old Gods, and sworn off the New-- not that they would do anything about it. Cameron laid thorns and roses with her every step. She oozed Glory. She stopped playing with the hammer and looked at her nude painting. 

The cold chicken's eye, all-absorbing, furious and helpless, beholding her, made a bitter taste appear in her mouth. It was a painting Dorian had commissioned, made her pose for, watched her hang up in her apartment. Tears sprouted in her eyes. Would it be better if the painting did not feature a gazer at all? If the only voyeur was the viewer of the work? Paint a beautiful woman with a mirror in her hand and preach about her vanity; paint a beautiful woman with her eyes towards the sky and discuss her sexuality. The portrait was agony to see: it was a demonstration of ownership, a brag, proof of a claim of her. It was evidence that she, for all her might, could still be perceived by lecherous, cruel others. 

Cameron raised her hands and dropped the hammer. "Nire feminitatea mantentzen dut eta. Nire jainkotasuna aldarrikatzen dut," she murmured. "Nire feminitatea mantentzen dut eta. Nire jainkotasuna aldarrikatzen dut." 

Flaming symbols appeared around her feet. The portrait ate itself from the corners in, cold, drinking away itself in shame. 

She called her doctor to schedule tooth filing surgery. It was about goddamn time, she thought, that she came into her birthright.


	6. everything meets in the center: Venus by Santo & Johnny

the number of daisy petals on a daisy increases and decreases across different species of the plant; to the unknowing onlooker, the numbers seem random. some daisies simply have more petals. but if you were to take every kind of daisy on earth, and count their petals, they may not be the same, but they will all be digits within the Fibonacci sequence. five petals on one. eight on the next. thirteen. and so on, ad infinitum. 

not many people know this. it's one of those everyday-holy, uncommon but unimportant pieces of information. it's like knowing that you can buy communion bread in bulk online, or being able to tell the story of the inception of Mort Garson's Plantasia-- to know the names of old opera singers, to have seen that picture of the woman who jumped from the Empire State Building and landed on a Cadillac and was dubbed 'The Most Beautiful Suicide'. 

when stanley and austin exited the cosmos, intimately entwined, and entered the Underworld, their minds were filled with these pieces of arcane knowledge. stanley murmured to himself, "to be taught to lack delight in loving others, or to lack sincerity when being loved, is one of the cruelest parts of childhood." austin stumbled out and said, "in Arabic, their pronouns for god refer not to a he or a she, but to an unknown entity; to everything but something. isn't that groovy?" 

the silver grass from between the linoleum snaked ever-upwards around their feet as they gathered their bearings. as far as could be seen, the Underworld had no ceilings and no walls. a gray fog hung around everything, lacking in opacity, so that many shapes in the distance were still visible. as the two lovers walked forwards, they became aware of a tinny wailing. they glanced around. 

"is that music, baby?" austin asked earnestly. he couldn't remember. 

"i think so... listen." stanley cupped a hand around his ear and bent down to the ground, letting his eyelashes brush the dirt so that he could feel any deep vibrations. 

playing was Venus by Santo & Johnny. neither of them recognized the song; neither could dorian tyrell, for the years and years that it played. it was two minutes long. two minutes and twelve seconds-- he'd bitterly counted every one of them, over and over again, trying to place the tune. it ignored him; whatever 'it' was, Dorian imagined it as a smiling face with bloodlust in its eyes. and he longed to kill it. sometimes, N'Quaith would sing Kate Bush songs in his ear, loud as possible. "please," he would beg, "please, sing something louder than Babushka! please, sing the Benatar take on Wuthering Heights!" but she would not oblige, and he would crumble a little more as he strained to focus on her high voice. 

Dorian saw them before they saw him; two figures, of an unfamiliar height and weight.

He evaluated the duo with a cold, hard stare, vicious as a starving panther, and pacing much like one, too. He recalled a time in his youth, when his father had taken him to see the animals at the zoo. His eyes had not changed since then; they had become what they were then, glacial and cruel, after he was forced to look upon the parakeets and exotic rats and huge felines, their ribs and eyes so deeply sunken into their bodies, they looked to be made of pipecleaners. Initially, Dorian had begun his career in criminal activity with ecotage: the People's Ecological Front, they called themselves. They were ruthless, deep ecologists, pledging moral worth to every living creature besides billionaires. But things had changed. Circumstance colluded with temperament. Dorian had destroyed the group from the inside out, and thus accepted that he was nothing more than an anger, a force of chaos, and agent of death. 

Thankfully, everyone's outfits were absolutely incredible. Not a single man who met in the Underworld that day didn't have a look going for them. 

Austin had ditched the velvet suit and jaunty cravat, picking up instead a glittery miniskirt that said 'T H U M B T A C K S' on the ass, or as he would say, arse, in hot pink bubble letters. He had on uggs that went up beyond his knees, and a light brown, faux fur coat, and his fingers-- now decorated in ornate, Satanic rings-- clutched the thousands of pearls around his neck when Dorian came into view. Stanley, alongside him, wore leopard print leggings and no shirt, instead warming his slender frame with a leather vest that stunk like American Spirit blacks. His feet, suddenly existent, were clad in fuzzy green slippers. As for Dorian? Dorian had on a high-collared cloak made of one-hundred per-cent silk. The collar was stiff, though, treated with an ethereal spray that produces dramatic flair in clothing-- one of N'Quaith's few gifts to him. Dorian also wore a sock over his penis and a set of souvenir sunglasses from Milwaukee. He was totally nude otherwise. 

They faced off in isosceles, Stanley and Austin close together, Dorian at their precise apex. 

"Something is wrong," Stanley began, holding up in his hands in peace-making. 

"You're right about that," Dorian said, in his tough-guy semi-New York accent. "You aren't dead yet." 

Austin snarled, showing his metaphysical fangs. "Don't you fuck around with my Mommy." 

Dorian leveled his eyes at Austin. "Who are you?" 

"Oh, behave!" Austin did an impression of himself. "I'm Austin Danger Powers, international man of mystery, super spy. I don't kiss and tell, I shag and brag, baby, yyeaaaahahHHhhhHHh!" 

Dorian shit. Stanley stepped forward, breaking the triangle. He began to monologue passionately. 

"Listen, D, I threw the Mask off a bridge and made out with Cameron Diaz. But nothing had really changed. I didn't feel any different. It was as if my entire story was just a vehicle for profit, as though there didn't need to be any soul in it, anything real! I mean, neither of us know anything about Cameron Diaz! We aren't in love! You weren't, either! And I, despite becoming something closer to myself with the Mask on, am still the same old Stanley Ipkiss. The only thing that changed at the end of our story was the material quality of it. There's nothing. I'm furious. I knew I needed to find you, to really, genuinely, resolve things. I need to find out who I am. I need to find out why so much nothing happened that was treated as something!" His plain, pleading brown eyes carried a message of desperation. 

Dorian looked from him to Austin skeptically, but something in his expression had softened. "I know what we need to do," he said, and tore the sock off of his penis. 

For the first time in ten thousand years, Santo & Johnny's Venus stopped playing. Now, it was Santo and Johnny's Midnight Cowboy, also on repeat. But the trio didn't notice-- they were too busy getting down to business. 

Initially, many people thought that the construction of the Eiffel Tower was a fool's errand. No structure had ever been that tall before. Others objected to it on the basis of artistic integrity. The Tower was once described as a cadaver, its wrought-iron majesty seen as skeletal, gloomy. Charles Alphand asked, in a petition against its construction published in Le Temps, for the readers to 'imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream.' He continues, 'and for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.' Yet now, the Tower is one of the most celebrated pieces of architecture in the world. Couples propose at its peak. Small children learn what acrophobia means on its pinholed, rickety stairs. Tourists and social media influencers pose in its 'hateful shadow'. 

Dorian, Austin, and Stanley were working on constructing an Eiffel Tower of their own. Instead of iron and cutting edge architectural technology, though, their tower was one of flesh and lust-- though it nonetheless would have been protested on both a structural and artistic basis, had they decided to erect it publicly. Charles Alphand rolled over in his grave as Dorian and Austin mounted Stanley on opposite sides, and clasped their hands together above his back to form the point of the Tower. Little did they know, having sex in the Underworld is the only way to enter the realm beneath it; the oldest realm, the place of Old Gods and tragedies, where relics go to be forgotten. Their bodies shook with the cataclysmic effort of holding the position while they chased pleasure in one another, grunting and hooting and spitting on each other. 

Before they could each ejaculate, an imminent phenomenon, the ground opened up and swallowed them. 

N'Quaith's corpse, not far off, watched it all happen with mirroring, dead eyes. 


End file.
